Denise

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Stumptown Syndicate, the 501(c)(3) organization that puts on a bunch of wonderful events including Open Source Bridge (which is probably my favorite conference) is running a fundraiser right now, and the wonderful Sumana Harihareswara (aka brainwane) is offering a matching donation: she and her partner will match up to $15,000 donated before 1:30pm PST tomorrow (Dec 31).

Sumana's post goes into a lot of detail about why OSB and Stumptown Syndicate are worth giving money to. Like her, OSB is the tech conference I've found most welcoming. Now that I've been (last year was my second year) I'm going to make it a point of never missing it again, short of utter disaster. Unlike many conferences, it's about the whole open source ecosystem -- design, documentation, project management, and culture, in addition to programming. It's the most welcoming conference I've ever attended; I've never once felt out of place, marginalized, or uncomfortable there. Their speaker lineup is the most diverse of any conference I've ever seen. They're fabulous at all the small touches that make the event feel like they want everyone there, from taped-off accessibility travel lanes, to catering that takes all manner of diet, food sensitivities, and allergies into account, to a quiet room to hang out in, to inclusive language everywhere -- and so many more little touches that make it clear inclusiveness is a top priority. And, of course, they give back to the open source world in many other ways: all the tools they've developed to run the event are available under an open license, including Open Conference Ware, the engine that runs everything.

There are a lot of conferences in the tech world that I'll go to, but I'll go with my armor up, waiting to stumble over the thing that reminds me I am not what they think of when they think of their target audience. Going to OSB is something you can do without that armor, and once you show up, you get to spend four days hanging out with some of the most amazing people in the tech world and geeking out about the things you love. As Sumana says, this fundraiser will help to take OSB's already-awesome inclusiveness and help it level up: they're hoping to fund childcare, improve the accomodations for Deaf or hard of hearing folks, and enable scholarships and travel assistance for people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford to attend. I think these are awesome goals!

So, if you have a few bucks you're not using, you can double their reach by donating now and unlocking more of Sumana's matching funds. And if you're looking for a great conference, OSB is running June 23-26 this year; I hope to see you there!

(I need to email in these photos so I can link them from the news post!)

Photo #1: us outside our server hosting company, complete with bonus @dive and @cheyinka and their adorable tiny human. Photo #2: sunset over the Capitol building, as seen from our hotel room balcony. Both photos by the lovely and talented @sarah.

( ack, forgot the cut! )

applications for adacamp san francisco (june 8-9) are now open!

adacamp is a two-day unconference for supporters of women in open technology and culture. if you are significantly female-identified (*) and into open stuff -- not just programming or technical matters, but any form of open data, open government, fan and remix culture, open education, open source, open technology, and so on -- you should really consider attending.

there's childcare available, too, if that would be a limiting factor! and there's (limited) travel funding you can apply for. the conference itself is "by invitation", but the invitation process is basically to make sure people have a basic level of awareness of feminism in order to get the most out of things and not be detrimental to the group as a whole; it's not there to exclude people who aren't "technical enough" (if you're reading this on the internet right now, you're technical enough). so if you're interested in hanging out for a weekend and talking with other women about open technology and culture, you should apply.

i went to adacamp dc and it was an awesome experience being around so many smart, interesting, engaging women. i'm not 100% sure yet whether or not i'm going to be able to go to this one, but if you can, you really should.

(*) based on feedback and requests, the main adacamp sf programming is restricted to women and people who are significantly female-identified. there's a parallel allies track for people of all other genders, being held on june 8. the ada initiative uses an inclusive definition of female-identified: if you identify primarily or significantly as a woman, you can register for the main track.

Thank you all for attending my talk! The slides are downloadable from Slideshare:

Web Accessibility for the 21st Century

This is the table of contents for the resource package, which contains:

• 31 Quick Techniques to Make Your Site More Accessible: a text-only version of the 31 tips provided in the talk itself, so you don't have to mess around with transcribing them.


• Further Reading: A list of resources, further reading, and Useful Sites.


• Writing Useful Alt Text: An exercise for you to practice with! A handful of images, each presented with two different bits of text. Write the alt text for each image in each context.


• Writing Alt Text: Answers (and not-answers): My own answers to that exercise, and my reasoning for why -- these aren't definitive, because there are many different ways of doing it, but you can compare my answers with your own.


• Inaccessible (and annoying) Websites: A discussion in dw_accessibility where people name off examples of particularly inaccessible websites (and why they're inaccessible). I wound up not having time to fit that into this tutorial, but you can browse the comments and see the examples!


• Assistive Tech (semi-) Poll: A while back, we wound up asking people to comment in dw_accessibility with information about what assistive technology they use. The answers are fascinating, and demonstrate the wide variety of assistive tech out there.


• And dw_accessibility in general: this is the community for our accessibility project team, and you can read through both the general accessibility-related discussions and also see some examples of how we solicit accessibility-related feedback and design features to be as accessible as possible.

If you have any questions that I didn't answer in the talk, or want to share some resources (or success stories after you go implement some of the advice!) please do comment!

Here's a list of a whole bunch of resources, tools, and information for you to do more reading about accessibility and accessible design. (This was done with the help of the dw_accessibility community, who are a bunch of very lovely people!)

They're roughly divided into categories, more or less.

If there's something I've missed, or another tool or resource you're fond of, leave a comment! (If you're commenting anonymously, or logged in with OpenID, you can leave links in the comments, but they'll be rewritten to display as bolded text followed by bare URLs: that's an antispam feature. I'll try to come through behind people and turn them into clickable links. Or you could create a Dreamwidth account!)

( Further Reading )

Writing good alt text is an art, not a science. The same image can be described in different ways based on context, flow, and what aspects of the image you want to call to a listener's attention. The WHAT WG HTML Living Standard "4.8.1.1. Requirements for providing text to act as an alternative for images" has a collection of requirements for alt text, and WebAIM has a whole article on Appropriate Use of Alternative Text -- both of these are very useful resources! But it still takes practice to get really good at it.

So, let's practice, and see ways in which the same image in two different contexts might make you want to write the alt text differently.

Each of these sample images has two sets of text next to it: one formally-written piece (unless otherwise cited, it's from a relevant Wikipedia article), and a more casually-written sample that might be a blog post in which the image would appear.

Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to write relevant and useful alt text for the image in each context. Don't just look at the image and think in your head "oh, I'd do blah blah": actually write it out!

As you work, think about the differences in how you write the alt text in each context, and how different uses of the image make you want to call attention to different aspects of the image contents.

At the bottom of the page is a link to my version of the answers, with a brief explanation for each. I will reiterate that my answer is not necessarily everyone's answer! There are many, many ways to write alt text, and many people disagree as to which is the most useful.

Screenreader users: please note that I'm just using the alt text provided by Flickr's "get this HTML code" here, to avoid giving too many clues. Non-screenreader users: please don't just take Flickr's "get this HTML code" without altering it; it defaults to the title of the picture, which is usually fairly unhelpful for descriptive purposes!

I've turned comments off on this particular post, but they're open on the "answers" page, and if people would like to discuss their choices (or why they don't agree with my choices), feel free.

( Take the alt-text practice exercise! )

Both mark and I got notice this afternoon that our proposed tutorials have been accepted for LinuxConf Australia in Canberra in January!

I will be giving (with help from deborah on the development thereof, but alas, she had a conflict with the conference itself) a one and a half hour tutorial called "Beyond Alt Text: What Every Project Should Know About Accessibility":

( working description of tutorial! )

I'm totally looking forward to it. We went to LCA a few years back (the year it was held in Wellington) and it was a fabulous conference full of fabulous people talking about smart and fabulous things. I'm looking forward to being able to return.

...with having so many of our contributors here for OSCON is that we have to balance "going to talks and conference sessions to learn awesome things" with "hunkering down on the couches and tables in the hotel lobby and hacking on awesome things".

(Things that people are or have been hacking on this week: image hosting; HTML5/jQuery/responsive-design etc mobile page; "fuzzy" feed matching so there will be fewer duplicate feed accounts and allowing for a "did you mean?" suggestion when creating a feed; extra icon add-ons; the bookmarks/memories overhaul; HTML5, responsive-design site skin; "clean up ALLLLLL the tiny bugs!" (that would be me!); backend/site-reliability stuff; upgrading the code to run on Perl 5.14 ... I'm pretty sure I'm missing stuff, too. Heh.)